Name 1 (THIS IS NOT THE FULL CHAPTER. ITS JUST HAS THE SECTIONS THAT INCLUDE THE DEFINITIONS) Chapter 5 Self and Identity Sociologists do not study personality per se but rather the self, a process in which we construct a sense of who we are through interaction with others. Because the self is a process, it changes over time. We can take snapshots of our senses of self at given times, but they regularly change as we interact with people and adapt to new events and transitions in our lives. That snapshot, or the outcome of the self-process at a given point in time, is the self-concept. Morris Rosenberg (1986) defined the self-concept as the sum total of thoughts and feelings people have about themselves as objects. Essentially, the “self process” creates the “self-concept,” or understandings people have about themselves. The self-concept is an “object” or thing, and just like other things, such as a baseball, a hat, or any other physical object, we can talk about and reflect on our self-concepts. Scholars examining the self-concept focus on self-identities (thoughts about ourselves, or the kind of person we see ourselves as) and on self-evaluations (feelings or judgments we make of ourselves). Three dimensions of self-evaluations we will discuss in this chapter are self-esteem, mastery, and mattering. Social psychologists approach the study of the self in diverse ways, often dependent on the broad theoretical traditions in which they work. Some symbolic interactionists focus on the self as a process, or self-presentations (behaviors linked to people’s “selves,” or how they present themselves to others). Here, scholars examine how we make meaning of who we are, in concert with significant others. Other, more Name 2 structural symbolic interactionists focus on how, through interaction, people’s selves come to reflect the structure of society in a stable understanding of who they are, in the form of identities and evaluations. Because society is highly differentiated, the self is composed of multiple, complex parts. Social structure and personality scholars explicitly consider how social-structural conditions, notably positions and statuses in society, affect the selfconcept. (“Social structure and the self-concept” may in fact be a better title for this field of study than “social structure and personality.”) Finally, group processes scholars emphasize the role of group processes in affecting identities. The I, the Me, and Self Narratives We use symbols and language to communicate with other people, but we also use language to think internally, a process that Herbert Blumer (1969) calls self-indication. We can have conversations with our selves just as we can with other people. Further, we can internally negotiate the meanings of objects, including our sense of self. In fact, internal dialogues are a common way to assess meaning in several situations. According to George Herbert Mead (1934), a large part of our internal dialogues occur as interplay between two components or characters within ourselves: the I and the Me. The Me is the organized set of attitudes toward the self, based on the views of significant others, such as friends and family, as well as society as a whole. The I refers to the active self; the I is the one on stage, in the moment, talking to other people. The “I” and the “Me” form a constant dialectic regarding thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (see Box 5.1). This internal dialogue reflects the importance we give to social conditions when deciding how to think, feel, or behave. In some sense, society resides in the Me. Because we have agency, the ability to make choices about our actions, the “I” is able to act based on the “Me” in a number of different ways. Ellen Granberg (2006) studied the ways that individuals use agency and internal Name 3 thought processes during a specific form of self-change: weight loss. Using in-depth interviews with 10 men and 36 women who had lost weight and sustained the weight loss for at least three months, she found that weight (or being overweight) was a major part of their identities and that images of their possible identities, or what their identities could be in the future, was a source of motivation to lose weight. They had images that losing weight would change the way they would live (e.g., buying smaller-sized clothing) and their interactions with other people. These images helped them sustain how they approached dieting. Did the reality of weight loss meet these images? Not always. Granberg found that the weight loss was accompanied by different sets of feedback from other people, and the reality of the weight loss did not always live up to their ideals. Identity Theory Identity theory (which derives from the symbolic interaction perspective) emphasizes the enduring nature of our thoughts about who we are. Identity refers to our internalized, stable sense of who we are, including role identities, social categories, and personal characteristics (Burke 2003; Burke and Stets 2009). Thus, identity includes our understanding of our unique nature (personality) as well as our social roles. Role identities are the internalized expectations associated with different positions. Some examples of role identities are college student, politician, or brother. For adults, the most important role identities typically stem from work and family positions. Social categories include identities related to social groups to which we belong, such as Canadian, woman, or Latino. Last, personal characteristics include anything we use to describe our individual nature, such as being kind or generous or athletic. Identity theory examines the ways in which society shapes how we view ourselves and how those views, Name 4 or identities, affect our behavior. Sheldon Stryker (2002) offered five principles that are at the root of identity theory: 1. Behavior is based on an already defined and classified world. 2. Positions in society are among the things classified in the world. 3. People develop their identities based on their positions in society. 4. We incorporate our social positions into our senses of identity; our positions become part of our senses of self. 5. Social behavior is derived from the shaping and modifying of the expectations of our positions. The theory is rather simple and eloquent and tries to predict behavior when people have choices. The premise is that society affects self, which affects behavior. Stryker’s definition of society refers to patterns of commitments to other people. Commitment includes the number of significant others tied to a given identity or to being a certain kind of person and the intensity of those bonds. Commitment shapes the salience of an identity, which in turn shapes how we will behave. For instance, living with many close friends in a sorority house makes a “Greek” identity highly salient. According to identity theory, this “Greek” identification affects our behavior that is partly an expression of our membership in a fraternity or sorority (wearing symbols, talking like others, and doing the philanthropy of that organization) when we have the opportunity to do so (see Box 5.2). Identity theory extends symbolic interactionist principles by focusing on the social construction of the self (principles #3 and #4) and the belief that there is an existing social reality that we use as the basis for self-identification processes (principles #1 and #2). Thereafter, identities generate behavior (#5), but we are able to “make” or play out roles in unique ways. Name 5 Peter Burke and Jan Stets (2009) indicate that identities tie us to society because an identity is partly based on multiple roles and statuses that were constructed before we entered them. In this sense, identity theory varies from psychological approaches to self and identity, which emphasize internal dynamics and interactions with people around us in the social construction of self and identity. Here, society is both a cause and outcome of such interactions. We construct our senses of self-based on the roles and statuses from society, and we change society by adding new statuses and roles or modifying existing ones. The tendency to seek confirmation of self-meanings is the basis of identity control theory (see Burke 2004; Burke and Stets 1999; Stets and Burke 2005; Stryker and Burke 2000). This theory proposes that self-consistency is as or more important to people than maintaining a positive selfimage. If that is true, how do individuals maintain their senses of self amid so many different social situations? Why do people change? Sheldon Stryker’s and Richard Serpe’s (1982) studies of youth entering college found that transitioning students employed both affective and interactional commitment to identities to help maintain their original senses of self when entering college (Serpe 1987; Serpe and Stryker 1987, 1993). Affective commitment refers to emotional attachment to an identity, while interactional commitment refers to maintaining relationships with people in different social spheres related to our identities. For example, being an environmentalist may be important to you, but you may not have close ties to other environmentalists. Stryker and Serpe also found that students tended to find groups that helped them maintain their senses of identity. When such groups were not available to them, the students’ initial identities began to change. Thus, while we seek to maintain identities that are important to us, we make changes when social resources are not available to stabilize our senses of self. In this way, our social relationships provide a mooring, a place of refuge and stability, for Name 6 our identities but it also suggests that we change our identities as our networks of relationships change resulting from life events and transitions such as going to college or taking a job (Cassidy and Trew 2001; Merolla et al. 2012). Some studies employing identity control theory have focused on self-change and stability among newly married couples (see Burke 2006; Cast and Cantwell 2007; Stets and Cast 2007). As people enter these relationships, they must negotiate new role relationships, working with their partner to determine how they should act as spouses. Partners bring images of themselves and the other into marriages (e.g., intelligence, attractiveness, and likeability). This line of research shows a general decline in the difference between self-views and spouses’ views over time. What is more, spouses will change their senses of self to match the other’s view whether it is positive or negative! If we think we are unintelligent but our spouse thinks we are smart, we are likely to develop a more positive sense of self. However, we are also likely to do the reverse: we will develop a more negative sense of self if our spouse has a negative view of us. How do we negotiate our sense of self in these relationships? Peter Burke (2006) argues that we make small changes in our self over time as we engage in routine activities. During those activities, we provide verbal and nonverbal feedback about our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that we use in our internal dialogue between the I and the Me. As more information about the self is gained over time, we begin to rethink our sense of who we are. We are not likely to see large-scale changes in our identities at any moment but small changes in the self over time. Affect control Theory When most of us think of the “self,” we think of our cognitions, or thoughts, about who we are. The self also includes sentiments and behavior (Burke and Stets 2009; Mackinnon and Heise Name 7 2010). Sentiments and behavior help to represent who we are and provide information to be evaluated. We tend to believe that our thoughts cause certain behaviors. But behaviors can also change our ways of thinking. For instance, you may not consider yourself very athletic until you find yourself obligated to play on the fraternity or sorority softball team. If you find that your performance is good after a few games, you may start to reevaluate your sense of your athleticism, incorporating this new information into your self-concept. Thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are all part of the self process. We use information from one or more components of the self to develop the other parts. We also shape feelings and behavior in a similar manner as the cognitive processes reviewed in the last section. Affect control theory (ACT) incorporates elements of symbolic interactionism and identity theory to explain the role of sentiments in identity processes (Smith-Lovin 1995). The theory states that sentiments serve as signals about how well we are producing our identities and reproducing others’ identities (Heise 1985). Negative emotions often signal that something is not right about a situation. If you see yourself as a high-performing athlete and then fumble the ball, the negative feelings you experience may serve as a sign that you are failing at your identity. You may later use the exchange between the I and the Me to contemplate the feeling that you are experiencing. Perhaps you will decide to act on that feeling or decide that it is not that important to you. Regardless, the initial emotional signal initiates this thinking process. In another example, if you make a mistake on the job, the bad feeling may lead you to question your ability to do the job. The feeling of shame or doubt suggests that you cannot live up to expectations of the job. To restore a positive feeling about yourself (i.e., self-esteem), you begin to use an internal dialogue in defense of your position. You may explain your poor performance as an anomaly or blame someone else for the problem. You may try to work harder to prove to yourself and others that your abilities are good enough. If the Name 8 explanation or action reestablishes your identity on the job, the negative emotion will subside. Affect control theory includes an analysis of the role of sentiments in interactions more generally. It is based on three basic principles (Heise 2002): 1. Individuals create events to confirm the sentiments that they have about themselves and others in the current situation. 2. If events do not work to maintain sentiments, then individuals reidentify themselves and others. 3. In the process of building events to confirm sentiments, individuals perform the social roles that are fundamental to society. These premises simply indicate that people use emotions in their day-to-day interactions to help them get along with other people. Affect control theory (Heise 1999, 2002, 2007; Lively and Heise 2004; see also Osgood 1962) proposes that there are three aspects of sentiment toward an object: 1. Evaluation (E): its goodness or badness. 2. Potency (P): its powerfulness or powerlessness. 3. Activity (A): its liveliness or quietness. Individuals may also develop transient sentiments during specific interactions, sentiments unique to particular interactions between people. These sentiments may or may not confirm fundamental sentiments about an object. For instance, in the United States, a patient may go see a doctor believing that she is fundamentally good (evaluation), powerful (potency), and neither lively nor still (activity) (Heise 2002). If the doctor lives up to that fundamental sentiment, Name 9 giving clear, concise advice in a neutral way, the patient’s transient sentiments concur with the fundamental sentiment, producing feelings of ease and gratefulness. Alternatively, if the doctor does not live up to these expectations, perhaps waffling in her diagnoses (less powerful), the fundamental and transient sentiments conflict, leaving the patient with negative feelings about the doctor and the interaction. The patient will evaluate the doctor not only in terms of what she says but also in terms of how she acts whether her tone is comforting or confrontational, for example. Nonverbal behaviors play as strong a role as verbal behaviors in forming people’s affective responses to others (Rashotte 2002). Steven Nelson (2006) found that we also reinterpret behaviors in order to minimize deflection between identities and behaviors. In one case, he asked students to minimize deflections in three categories like: grandmother (actor) chased (behavior) addict (object). In this case, students had to choose whether to change the actor, behavior, or object in order for the interaction to make sense. They could, for instance, change grandmother to police such that “police chase addict.”In two studies, Nelson found abundant support for the idea that people have a tendency to change the behavior to match individuals’ role identities rather than change actors to match behaviors. These findings are important because they suggest that identities, once constructed, are hard to change and that individuals will try to make sense of behaviors to match identities, rather than reidentify individuals based on their behaviors. Affect control theory may help to explain why rational explanations of behaviors are often inadequate. Why do rulers act irrationally at times, in ways that lead to disaster for their own countries? David Heise and Steven Lerner (2006) applied affect control theory to help explain international relations. They coded 1,934 international incidents among 25 Middle Eastern nations from the 1970s into the EPA dimensions reviewed in this chapter. They found that EPA ratings of nations’ acts predicted other nations’ subsequent Name 10 reactions of the initial act. That is, initial evaluations affected other nations’ foreign policy decisions. Dramaturgical Sociology Symbolic interaction emphasizes the fact that humans have agency, the power to act independently of constraints. Thus, individuals can act apart from their senses of self. You may consider yourself to be a below-average student but decide to “act” like a stellar one in front of a professor. The study of how we present ourselves, playing roles and managing impressions during interactions with other people, is called dramaturgical sociology. Dramaturgical sociology is most closely associated with Erving Goffman (1922–1982). It includes the study of impression formation and the management of impressions. It is also associated with short-term changes in the self through the impression processes. In a sense, identity and affect control theories incorporate elements of dramaturgical sociology. These theories posit that when our identity does not match the environment, we change in some way to ensure that the two are commensurate. The theories assume that we have some control over what others think about us in a given interaction, a basic premise of dramaturgical sociology. Dramaturgical sociology also incorporates that idea that we choose to act differently from our identities during social exchanges and that we have to practice identities before fully incorporating them into our senses of self. Our personal sense of identity and our perceptions of the conceptions people have of us form a constant dialectic under the heading of impression management. Impression Management Name 11 Erving Goffman (1959) believed that we seek information from people when we come in contact with them. We use such information to help establish expectations of our behavior and that of the people around us. Information comes from the physical attributes of the other people—their race or gender, for instance—as well as our histories with those people. We also have some control over the information we give to other people. For instance, we can dress formally to give people the impression that we are mature and serious. Similarly, we can wear jeans and a T-shirt if we want to look relaxed. The former dress may help get a job, whereas the latter is more appropriate among friends and family. Impression management refers to the ways that individuals seek to control the impressions they convey to other people. Impression management is a social process, involving more than just our own behavior. For instance, you can try to impress a potential employer by wearing nice clothing but cannot ensure that the employer finds the dress appropriate. In this way, there are impressions given and impressions given off—the impression you believe that you are giving and the impression the other person has of you. Goffman argued that we are driven to create and maintain positive impressions, probably because some goals or outcomes of interactions are to avoid embarrassment or to enhance our personal position in an interaction (Gawley 2008; Scheff 2006). You would feel embarrassed if you tried to present yourself as a serious job candidate but lost your keys and spilled coffee. To avoid this impending embarrassment, we may plan ahead by not bringing coffee to the appointment or having a spare set of keys available in case of such an emergency. Alternatively, we may contemplate the way we react to embarrassing interactions to make them appear better than they are (e.g., making a joke about the incident to show that we are not concerned about it). Goffman also observed that other people are driven to help support our impressions. For instance, the employer may make a joke about your clumsiness or give you an Name 12 opportunity to explain why you are especially clumsy that day. You might respond in agreement, finding an excuse like the wobbly new shoes you are wearing. Thus, both of you have found a way to make the impression as favorable as possible under those conditions. The motivation to support others’ impressions is somewhat self-serving. First, helping other people maintain their impressions also helps maintain the interaction, helping us predict future behavior and making it easier for us to know what to do. Second, we may need support in our own impression management efforts later in the interaction. Helping the other person makes it more likely that the other person will reciprocate support for us. This process, in which we to try to protect our own and others’ presentation of self, is called face-work (Goffman 1967). In one study, Jooyoung Lee (2009) utilized ethnographic fieldwork of street corner ciphers (impromptu rap sessions) and found that rappers used ritualized techniques to help each other out of embarrassing situations. For instance, if a rapper began to fall off on a song, another rapper would jump in and take over. In the end, this technique helped the group because it kept the song going. In this way, face-work helped to relieve the potential embarrassment of losing face and helped the group at the same time. Front Stage, back Stage Goffman described two regions of impression formation and management. Goffman’s front stage is the place where we present ourselves to others. The backstage is the region where we relax our impression management efforts, and we may practice our performances (Goffman 1959). We think of the job interview as the front stage, trying to look and act in a way that will make a certain impression and allow us to reach the goal of employment. When you see your friends (your backstage), you may express a very different attitude toward the job and the employer. Similarly, you may want to sound serious and polite when you approach a professor Name 13 about a test grade, then report your anger and disgust about the grade and the professor with your friends in the campus dining hall after the meeting. This usually works fine, unless your “backstage” is revealed; that is, if your friends point out to you that your professor is eating her lunch right behind you. Spencer Cahill and his colleagues (1985) studied behavior in public bathrooms; assessing the role that social structure plays in the most “private” or “backstage” areas of our lives. He and his colleagues observed and took notes of behavior for hundreds of hours in the bathrooms of malls, student unions, restaurants, and other places over a nine-month period. Among other things, they found that bathrooms serve as a place to “retire” from frontstage performances. The researchers showed that bathrooms serve as “self-service” repair shops, where individuals can take off their “fronts.” Mirrors allow us to check our front (e.g., hair and clothing) before facing the public again. Bathrooms also serve as a retreat from embarrassment, a place to prepare for publicly awkward situations—giving people a “staging area” for their public performances. One of the reasons why people change is because their social environments change. The situated self is a temporally based sense of who we are. For the brief time we are interviewing for a job, we may really believe that we are good, trustworthy employees who would take the job and employer seriously. That perspective may change after leaving the office and discussing the interview with friends and family. Thus, impression management is an integral part of the situated self. In another example, Karen Stein (2011) argues that modern vacations give us the opportunities to create a situated self, a temporary identity that is limited to a specific place and time. That is, since vacations are typically set apart from people who we know and are for a limited period of time, we can utilize impression management to change our identity among Name 14 strangers who are unable to challenge our claims. One reason that we are able to sustain these new images is because vacations require only a short time in which to maintain our cover. Self-esteem Self-esteem is the positive or negative evaluation of our self as an object (Rosenberg 1986). It answers the question“How good am I?”In addition to thoughts about how worthy we are, social psychologists also understand self-esteem to be the emotional reactions to the self (Hewitt 2003a). Thus, self-esteem has at least two dimensions; we can both cognitively and affectively react to the self. For instance, we may think highly of ourselves and concurrently feel good about ourselves. Alternatively, we can think poorly of ourselves and feel bad too. Self-esteem is global or specific; that is, an overall sense of worth or a sense of worth based on specific roles or spheres of life. Academic self-esteem is our feelings of worth as a student (Rosenberg, Schooler, and Schoenbach 1989). Self-concept theorists often study the effects of social structure and culture on selfesteem. For instance, Schooler and Oates (2001) found that people who work in jobs that require little supervision from others and who engage in intellectually complex tasks have higher self-esteem years later than others who perform more mundane work. Another study examined how girls were affected by unrealistic images of female beauty prominent in the media (Milkie 1999). For white girls, even when they were critical of the “perfect” images, the images depressed selfesteem, because girls still made social comparisons with models and assumed that boys “bought into” the images and viewed the real girls more negatively. However, Black girls’ self-esteem was not affected by these comparisons—they understood that significant others did not believe the images were a standard for African American beauty. Thus, people’s statuses and social relationships help them interpret information from the media and other sources in assessing their Name 15 self-worth. The importance of self-esteem, according to some scholars, is profound. Many social psychologists believe that self-esteem serves as a basis for motivation of the self process. Viktor Gecas (2001) argued that self-esteem might be a more important motivational force for us than other self processes. Gecas says that individuals are motivated by the self-consistency motive to maintain a consistent sense of self and the self-esteem motive to maintain positive self-images. For example, the threat of bad grades (which could produce lower academic self-esteem) may motivate us to study harder for class. It may motivate us to leave school and find an alternative source of esteem. However, someone who receives lower grades may come to see herself as a bad student and work less hard as a student to maintain her negative sense of self. The set of research discussed in this chapter shows that self-esteem is, in part, derived from social interaction. In fact, there are four sources of the self-concept: social comparisons, reflected appraisals, psychological centrality, and self-perceptions (Gecas 1982; Rosenberg 1986). Social comparisons refer to using other people and groups as points of reference for our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Reflected appraisals are the ways that we believe others view us. Psychological centrality is our ability to shift aspects of the self to become more or less important to our overall self-concept. Finally, self-perceptions are observations of our behavior and its consequences. An internal dialogue forms the self. Positive or negative evaluations of your self (selfesteem) are the result of your internal dialogue, compiling self-perceptions, social comparisons, and reflected appraisals. Marsha, in the vignette at the start of this chapter, indicated that she felt good about herself as a mother. Her mothering self-esteem was built through all the processes described. She probably made social comparisons with other student mothers and believed that, compared to them, she was doing quite well taking care of her baby. Through interacting with others, her parents, her partner, her friends, and her baby, she is able to Name 16 form a view of how they viewed her mothering (or reflected appraisals). In terms of psychological centrality, her mothering identity is very important and thus provides a positive global sense of worth as well. And, finally, by observing her own behaviors—sacrificing time at parties and studying when necessary—she sees evidence that she is a good mother. Mastery Another important dimension of the self is mastery. Mastery refers to our perceptions of our ability to control our environments. It addresses the question “How powerful am I to do the things I would like to do?”Mastery is similar to the concepts of self-efficacy and locus of control (see Box 5.3). Much like self-esteem, sociologists believe that our desire for control serves as a motivational aspect of our self-image (Gecas 1989). Occasionally, a self-fulfilling prophecy may operate, a case of expectations producing a reality consistent with the assumptions at work: if we do not believe that we can do something, we may not even try. If others do not believe that you are capable of doing a job and treat you as incompetent, you will likely find ways to avoid the job or fail at it. By failing at the job, you receive information that pushes you to continue to believe that you are not capable of doing the work. Mastery is associated with a host of positive outcomes in life ranging from physical and mental health to obtaining a good job. People with a higher sense of mastery report fewer mental and physical health problems than those with a lower sense of mastery (Caputo 2003; Cheung and Sun 2000). Mastery is also related to selfesteem: people with a high sense of mastery report higher levels of self-esteem (Turner and Roszell 1994), as you might expect. Mastery also serves as a personal resource to cope with life’s problems. For instance, Leonard Pearlin and colleagues (1981) found that people with a higher sense of mastery react less severely to job loss than do those with a lower sense of mastery, probably because they believed that they would be able to overcome their problems and Name 17 would use resources such as those in their social networks to help them. In addition, people with a higher sense of mastery early in their careers are more likely to achieve their occupational expectations later in life (Reynolds et al. 2007). Given the importance of mastery in our lives, how does one develop high levels of mastery? Development of one’s sense of mastery starts in infancy as children begin to understand causality in their environments (Gecas 1989). As children try to change their worlds, they assess whether such attempts have effects. If so, children learn that they have the ability to make such changes. In this way, a sense of efficacy begins through personal accomplishments, being able to achieve what we start out to do. Personal accomplishments continue to be a most important source of efficacy in adulthood, but there are other sources of efficacy. Vicarious experience occurs by seeing other people perform tasks, showing us that the task can be accomplished. Verbal persuasion is information from others about our abilities. Finally, emotional arousal refers to inferences about our abilities based on our emotional states (Bandura 1977). For instance, we hesitate to give a speech to a club or group to which we belong. However, our friends try to boost our confidence by using verbal persuasion, arguing that we are capable of making a great speech and increasing our sense of mastery. We then start observing other people’s speeches, making the task seem more reasonable for us to accomplish. We may then reflect on the large amount of fear provoked when we consider making the speech. This series of internal and social negotiations influences our decision to make the speech, how well we perform if we do make the speech, and the likelihood of making future speeches. Mattering Mattering refers to our sense that we are important to other people (Elliott, Kao, and Grant 2004; Rosenberg and McCullough 1981). It answers the question “How much do I matter to Name 18 others?”According to Morris Rosenberg and Claire McCullough (1981), we have an intrinsic need to feel that we are needed by the people around us. The link between mattering and wellbeing is related to the work of the classic sociologist Emile Durkheim. Durkheim (1951, originally 1897) studied the social conditions that influence individuals’ decisions to commit suicide. He argued that people who are more integrated in society are better adjusted and are less likely to commit suicide than those who are less integrated. Because mattering measures, in part, how much people feel needed by others, those needs may represent the sense of one’s integration into a group. Rosenberg’s and McCullough’s (1981) findings showed mattering to be positively related to self-esteem and negatively related to depression and anxiety, independent of selfesteem. People with a greater sense of mattering tend to have higher levels of self-esteem and lower levels of depression and anxiety than those with lower senses of mattering. The Twenty Statements Test One of the ways that you can assess your own identity is by taking the Twenty Statements Test, or TST (see Figure 5.1). Go try it now before reading further! Manford Kuhn and Thomas McPartland (1954) developed the TST to assess individuals’self-concepts. The test simply asks respondents to answer the question“Who am I?” 20 times. Responses to the TST are generally divided into four categories or “modes”: the physical self, the social self, the reflective self, and the oceanic self (Zurcher 1977). The physical self refers to physical characteristics such as hair color or height. The social self refers to roles and statuses, such as student, daughter or son, and gender. The reflective self refers to our feelings and traits such as being shy or kindhearted. An additional category, the oceanic self, includes those dimensions of the self that do not easily fit into the first three categories, usually referring to some holistic sense of self. TST results are influenced by context. If you took this test in a classroom, for example, the “student” identity Name 19 might be highly salient and listed among the first few responses. You can try to compare selfratings with people around you using the categories listed. Early research in the TST from the 1950s found that most students characterized themselves primarily in terms of the social self, identifying themselves in terms of the social roles and groups to which they belonged. More recent work shows a move toward the reflective self, focused on feelings and personal traits (Grace and Cramer 2002; Snow and Phillips 1982). Further, although women are somewhat more likely to report family roles than men, there is little difference in test outcomes between men and women (Mackie 1983). Responses to the TST tend to be positive. Few people report things such as “I am a bad person.” Recent research using the TST has attempted to explore this issue with the development of the“Who Am I Not”(WAIN) test (McCall 2003). Instead of asking who I am, the WAIN test asks respondents to answer the question“Who am I NOT?”There may be two poles of our identity, one in which we anchor identities (the “Me”) and one in which we disidentify (the“Not-Me”). Social Identity Theory If you filled in the Twenty Statements Test in Figure 5.1, you may have noticed that your selfconcept is composed of various components. You may see yourself in terms of your gender, your nationality, your race or ethnicity, the college or university you attend, and any other number of factors. According to social identity theory, we carry self-definitions that match all the categories to which we belong. In this theory, self-definitions are called social identities. Originally developed in psychology, social identity theory proposes that our social identities describe to us who we are, provide us with information about how to behave, and tell us how we should evaluate other people (Hogg, Terry, and White 1995). The theory argues that people define themselves, in part, by their group memberships (Hogg and Ridgeway 2003; Tajfel 1982). Name 20 In addition, in any given social context, some of our social identities will be more salient to us than others. Imagine, for example, being a staunch Democrat in a meeting of your university’s Young Republicans Club (or vice versa). In that case, your social identity tied to your political views would probably be very salient because it would mark you as different from other members of the group. When a social identity is salient, social identity theory says that we will perceive ourselves according to that identity. Further, we will tend to behave in ways that are stereotypical of that identity. If you are a woman in a situation in which your gender identity is highly salient, for example, social identity theory says that you will tend to act in ways that are gender-stereotypical for women in our society. Perhaps most important, social identity theory argues that when identities are salient, we will view members of other groups in ways that are stereotypical for their group. Thus, when social identities become salient, our relationships with and perceptions of people in different categories of that identity will be competitive and discriminatory (Hogg and Ridgeway 2003). According to social identity theory, we not only see ourselves in terms of our category memberships but also seek to assign other people to social categories. Categorization is the process through which we draw sharp dividing lines between group membership categories and assign people (including ourselves) to relevant categories. You might, for example, see stark differences between Democrats and Republicans and seek to assign people to one category or another. When we do this, we accentuate similarities we perceive between people in the same categories (Deaux and Martin 2003). For example, we might tend to see all Democrats as highly homogeneous in their views. We also accentuate perceived differences across categories. You might, for example, see Democrats and Republicans as fundamentally different in how they view the world when there are many similarities. When these processes happen, people Name 21 (including ourselves) are depersonalized and see only in terms of their category memberships. Self-enhancement refers to the process through which we make comparisons that favor our own groups. This can be done in multiple ways. One way we draw comparisons that favor our own groups can be to essentially delude ourselves into seeing our group as better than it really is. Another way is to focus specifically on differences that favor our own group while ignoring differences that do not. For example, when students at a state university and students at a community college compare themselves on their identities associated with their colleges, social identity theory would expect each to make comparisons most favorable to their own groups. The university students, for example, might focus on the diverse opportunities available to them, whereas the community college students might focus on their small class sizes and access to professors. The ramifications of social identity processes can be large. Jason Sunshine and Tom Tyler (2003) showed that people are more likely to cooperate with police, for instance, if they think the police represent the moral values of a society—that they represent “one of us.” Thus, we may use our group affiliations to bias our understandings of other people’s motives. We may also use social identities to judge the competency of other people, showing favoritism toward people in our own social category over others (Barnum and Markovsky 2007; Kalkhoff and Barnum 2000; Oldmeadow et al. 2003). Social identity theory shows how group processes affect our identities. Our senses of self derive in large part from the groups to which we belong, and we tend to view others and ourselves in terms of group memberships. The tendencies toward selfenhancement associated with social identity theory are relevant to racial and ethnic group tensions. Strong ties to a particular group will likely lead to positive self-esteem, but they will likely bias perceptions of people outside of our racial or ethnic group. Social identity theory and Name 22 the research associated with it clearly show that such biases exist. We will address the role of ingroup and out-group bias more in Chapter 9. SELF CONCEPT TELEGRAM GAME Find a friend to help you complete this task. Below is an extremely abbreviated technique to encourage people to begin discussing the general environments of their home of origin. It is designed to begin a discussion of how different style families are suited to giving children a functional self-concept. Do not take this as anything more than a game or a technique to get people talking about the general topic. Only four definitions are needed. Self-concept – The image you hold of yourself. Fertile environs – A family that provides its children most of what they need to develop a strong self-concept. Loving parents, a proper balance between guidance and freedom to learn about the world, and many rich experiences from which to learn. Barren environs – A home with little to offer. Children left on their own with no guidance, neglect but no mental or physical hostility or violence. Parents in this family try to hide their neglect behind the attitude, “The kid has to learn about life, so I’m letting him learn on his own.” Hostile environs – a family that negatively effects the child with hostile and/or violent actions. These homes usually have troubled parents who produce troubled kids. As you would expect, the research shows the first pattern to the best for child selfconcept development, the Hostile to be the worst, and the Barren somewhere in between. Write a couple of paragraphs about how the technique began a discussion of how different style families are suited to giving children a functional self-concept.
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